Science requires an ambient of academic freedom that entails the free exchange of ideas, ideas that can be tested in the laboratory and eventually rejected or accepted by the rigorous scientific method. But how can dissenters be heard when medical journals have established a monolithic wall of censorship, excluding ideas different from those espoused by the smug leaders of “organized medicine” and the medical editors appointed as the guardians of truth? Difference of opinions and the freedom to express them are essential to intellectual discourse.

In the wake of the heinous Las Vegas shooting, the medical politicians of the American Medical Association and the public health establishment — which is to the left side of politics on just about any topic even remotely related to medicine — have rallied to the cause of gun control political propaganda, rather than science. Toward the cause, they have resumed drumming up arguments that have been thoroughly refuted in the past.

The essence of all revolutionary systems and their eventual political manifestation depends on gaining, extending, and retaining power. Direct action, as we witnessed in the French Revolution and the revolutions that followed, such as National Socialism in Germany, fascism in Italy, and Soviet, Cuban, Southeast Asian and Chinese communism, brings centralized political power to the fore rapidly and necessitates equally rapid consolidation of power into the hands of the elite designers of the collectivist blueprint.

One of the great books of the 20th century was Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.[1] I once had a fellow medical student tell me as I was discussing the dangers of communism that it mattered little what a person believes—ideas, she informed me, were personal and benign. Weaver shatters this dangerous idea in his scholarly book. He demonstrates that it matters very much what people think because they behave and design their lives according to the ideas they hold dear.